Tsar Bomba: Russia's Quest to Create the Most Destructive Nuclear Weapon in History and the Explosion it Caused

 The explosion creates a bright red and orange fireball that is five miles wide in diameter--a mini manmade flaming sun.  This fireball is visible to the naked eye from over six-hundred miles away.  In the seconds after the explosion a giant mushroom cloud over forty-two miles high, eight times the size of Mount Everest, reaches all the way into the stratosphere.

A witness, commissioned by the Soviet Union as a cameraman to document the event, and flying in an observation aircraft some fifty miles from the detonation described what he witnessed years later by saying, “Slowly and silently the fireball crept upwards.  Having broken through the thick layer of clouds it kept growing…it seemed to suck the whole earth into it.  The spectacle was fantastic, unreal, spectacular.”

It is October 30, 1961 in the skies over the Soviet Union on the edge of the Arctic Circle and this is the test detonation of the “Tsar Bomba” or “Tsar’s Bomb”--the largest and most powerful nuclear weapon ever made and the greatest manmade explosion to ever take place on the face of the earth.

Mushroom Cloud of Tsar Bomba

“Tsar Bomba” was fifteen hundred times more powerful than the atomic bombs dropped over Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of World War Two.  It weighed over 60,000 pounds; was twenty-seven feet long and measured nearly seven and a half feet at its maximum diameter.  When dropped Tsar Bomba generated the explosive force of fifty-eight tons of TNT.

Tsar Bomba Prototype

The Tsar’s Bomb, the most powerful nuclear weapon ever made was the brainchild of one man--Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev.

Development on the Tsar Bomba began in 1956.  At that time, having fallen behind the United States in long range nuclear capability, the Soviet Union wished to do something to narrow the arms gap, and in 1955 Premier Khrushchev proposed the construction of a 100 megaton nuclear bomb.

Former United States Director of Nuclear Weapons Testing Philip Coyle when writing about the state of nuclear affairs in general and the Tsar Bomba in particular during the mid 1950’s has written that, “We (the U.S.) were ahead and the Soviets were trying to do everything to tell the world that they were there to be reckoned with.  Tsar Bomba was primarily designed to cause the world to sit up and take notice of the Soviet Union as an equal.”

Nikita Khrushchev (R) with President Eisenhower

However, Russian scientists led by the esteemed physicist Igor Kurchatov feared that a bomb so large might cause an explosion so enormous and so powerful that the radioactive fallout, from even a nuclear test of such a weapon, could potentially make large tracts of the earth uninhabitable and therefore the nuclear development team of Soviet physicists led by Kurchatov was able to persuade Khrushchev to pursue development on a smaller “Tsar Bomba” of half of its intended original size.  Even such a smaller bomb was over four times larger than the most powerful nuclear weapon in the United States arsenal at the time.

Igor Kurchatov is called the father of the Russian atomic bomb and he is, to this day, considered one of the world’s most brilliant nuclear physicists.   He was greatly esteemed and honored by the Soviet Union during his career in the 1940’s and 50’s.  Only a scientist as well loved and respected as Kurchatov could possibly have questioned the will of Premier Khrushchev and persuaded the Soviet dictator to change his mind.  The world should definitely be thankful for Igor Kurchatov, because without him having questioned the wisdom of Khrushchev’s decision, many of us may not be here today at all.

Igor Kurchatov would die on February 7, 1960, a full year and a half before development of the Tsar Bomba was complete, as a result of over exposure to nuclear radioactivity.

Igor Kurchatov with Soviet medals

Nikita Khrushchev first made the world officially aware of the Soviet super-weapon, Tsar Bomba, on October 17, 1961 in his annual report to the 22nd Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.  But, the world had become aware over a month and a half before Khrushchev’s official announcement on September 8 of that year when the New York Times had published an article, which did cause some panic in the United States, stating that the Soviet Union was seeking to catch up in the arms race with America by creating the world’s largest atomic bomb.  The Times, it was said, had learned of the Soviet plans after Khrushchev had drunkenly let slip a comment about Tsar Bomba to a reporter during a personal conversation that was supposed to have been off the record.

One day short of two weeks after the official announcement on October 30, 1961 Tsar Bomba was dropped by parachute from a specially designed Tu-95 long range, four engine turbo-prop bomber.  The Tu-95 bomber that dropped Tsar Bomba was painted all white in an effort to deflect the massive flash that was expected from the bomb.  Interestingly enough, the Tu-95 bomber is still in service with the Russian Air Force to this very day after its first introduction as a long range bomber capable of a nuclear strike on the United States nearly seventy years ago in 1955.

Tu-95 Bomber still in Service today with the Russian Air Force

The bomb detonated at an altitude of 4500 feet.  It was believed, rightly so, by Soviet scientists that having the detonation at such a high altitude would help prevent the worst effects of radioactive fallout.  The Soviets detonated Tsar Bomba above a place called Sukhoy Nos (Dry Nose) which is a rocky desolate cape that juts off of Severny Island in the icy arctic waters west of Scandinavia and north of Siberia.

The exact timing of Tsar Bomba’s detonation was intended to be top secret, but the 58 megaton nuclear test was instantly picked up by an American reconnaissance aircraft and results of the test were closely monitored by the CIA.

Even if an American spy plane had not been in the area at the time, the detonation of Tsar Bomba by the Soviet Union would have been nearly impossible for anyone on earth to miss.  

The flash and fireball caused by the explosion of Tsar Bomba was visually observed from as far away as Norway, Greenland and even parts of Alaska.  The explosion created a seismic event that fully circled the earth three times.  Glass shattered in Russian towns and cities located over 500 miles away, and all buildings on Severny Island whether made of wood or brick, with the closest one being a full thirty-four miles from the bomb test site, were completely destroyed.  

One witness aboard a Soviet ship at  sea a full one-hundred and seventy miles from the detonation site reported that the blast, “Burned my eyes and caused temporary blindness,” despite the fact that he was wearing dark goggles.

In the immediate aftermath of the Tsar Bomba test the Norwegian newspaper Barents Observer reported that, “(T)he massive radioactive fallout from the blast was measured across all of Scandinavia.”

Both the United Nations and the United States Congress denounced the Tsar Bomba detonation as irresponsible and a threat to humanity even though the United States had itself been the first nation to test a thermonuclear bomb six years earlier on March 1, 1954 in the skies over Bikini Atoll in the vast expanse of the Pacific Ocean.

Chart depicting the explosive force of Tsar Bomba

Paradoxically, the testing of Tsar Bomba, which was designed to cause the world to sit up and take notice of Soviet nuclear power, directly led in 1963 to the signing of a Nuclear Partial Test Ban Treaty between the United States and the Soviet Union which banned the testing of nuclear weapons in the earth’s atmosphere, outer space or underwater.  At the time of its signing the Nuclear Partial Test Ban Treaty was considered a watershed event during the Cold War and was seen as proof of improving relations between the USA and the USSR.

Unfortunately, by the late 1960’s and early 1970’s the Nuclear Partial Test Ban Treaty of 1963 had led to nothing due to advances in technology which led to the proliferation of Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles and the shift to underground nuclear testing by both the United States and the Soviet Union, which prevented radioactive nuclear fallout from occurring above ground but led to ever increasingly contaminated soil across both countries as the Cold War progressed.

Perhaps, the quest to build the world’s biggest bomb is forever buried in the history books.  Today, we can look back on Nikita Khrushchev’s dream as a piece of 1950’s Cold War nostalgia never again to be repeated in today’s modern age of more advanced technology.

However, given the world situation today where cold blooded Russian aggression once again runs rough-shod over eastern Europe and where nuclear weapons can be deployed across the world at the push of a button, the ominous mushroom cloud of Tsar Bomba hangs over all of us now more so than it ever has before.